LONDON — After only two months in this city, I’ve already become a true Londoner. Which I define as: Someone who can’t stop talking about how much better New York is.

By the time you read this, I will have completed a short working stint in the UK, and be back home. Already I’m having pastel, soft-focus visions of the wonderland of delights that is JFK Airport. Watch out, Van Wyck Expressway, I am coming to kiss your potholes.

Completing my Escape from London is my chief worry. I am factoring in spending more time on the London Tube than on the flight. This week, five out of 11 underground trains went down. At the same time. At rush hour. When it was 80 degrees. (A sixth went down slightly later.) New York had better train service than that on 9/11. It was about the sixth time I’ve been an involuntary witness to an epic railway fail in the past few weeks.

Were people screaming? Did the tabloids run front-pagers on the mess? No, pet, that wouldn’t be British.

What visitors describe as New York rudeness is really more like frankness, or a collective acknowledgment of our shared and sacred covenant, the New York imperative with which Billy Joel used to end his concerts: “Don’t take any s – – – from anybody!” Let us be proud.

New York has a lot of reasons to lord it over our so-called main competitor for the title of World City Numero Uno. Walking in London, you’ll notice that there is no room to maneuver: The sidewalks are about as wide as Kate Moss’s thighs, and improving this situation would mean picking up all the buildings and moving them back six feet. Every few yards — in every neighborhood, not just their equivalent of Times Square — your progress is further impeded by a gaggle of hopeless tourists from Lithuania or Slovenia clutching maps and pleading for directions. Huge portions of sidewalk are also taken up by “Boris bikes,” racks for park-and-ride rentals named after the charming but ceremonial Mayor Boris Johnson. You start to notice that, Zimbabwe-like, half the population arrives at work in Mercedeses and the other half on bikes.

New York’s generous sidewalks and wide streets (an artery hilariously misnamed “the Highway” that runs near my apartment in London is not even as wide as West 86th Street, much less a real highway) yield all sorts of pleasures that are limited or unavailable in London, such as sidewalk cafes and our world-beating array of food trucks. You can find open-air food markets in London, if you’re willing to try your luck on the subway to get there, but that defeats the purpose. Not that it often stops raining long enough for you to want to be outside in the first place.

The narrow, constricted, can’t-breathe feeling of London is worsened by its lack of lungs. Unlike (relatively) green and verdant New York, where you are seldom more than a mile or two from the nearest park, my neighborhood in East London has no open spaces to speak of. The nice ones are in the Western part of the city, where you need a Park Avenue level of income to live.

Nor is there enough access to the river. You can jog all the way up the path on the Hudson in Riverside Park, whereas the so-called Thames Path is, in large part, not even on the Thames; you keep getting forced to take detours off the river and around giant office buildings that turn their backs to the water. Simply finding a place to jog in eastern London while unmolested by traffic is absurdly difficult.

“When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life,” Dr. Johnson tells us. Preposterous. It’s easy to tire of a place where people come in the office and trade mugging stories (shades of New York circa 1992). Pubs are closing by the hundreds, TV is a wasteland of dull documentaries and quiz shows starring Stephen Fry, skies are a weeping gray and you can’t get a decent hot dog, though if you could it would cost $6. (And gas is $9 a gallon, and you have to pay a daily $17 toll just for driving around in the city.)

Mayor Bloomberg has a mighty crush on London, and is trying to make New York City more like it — starting with 10,000 rental “Bloomy bikes.” He seems to think that London is our primary competitor for global businesses, culture, food and class. But it’s no contest.

Don’t listen to me, a New Yorker of 20 years (exactly, as of June 1). Take it from a longtime Londoner, novelist Martin Amis, who titled his best novel “London Fields.” Amis is currently a refugee from blighted Blighty living in amazement in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.

Looking out on his leafy streets, peaceful cafes and mommies pushing their strollers around with no apparent fear of being stabbed, he told The Telegraph, “I can’t imagine why New Yorkers don’t go around boasting about it for three or four hours every day.”